Using engineering offensively: are there going to be opportunities for players to sneak on board ships and use the tools of engineering offensively?

Yes.

Do you want to elaborate on that at all?

I can elaborate on that. We want to tie it in with a hacking gameplay. We want to allow you to hook yourself into one of the items and then get access to... Imagine yourself being the aggressor on the ship: you plug yourself into the power plant. A, there's the option that you physically damage it, so you might punch it or use a hammer or a wrench on it or use a beam to destroy it. We have our beams. It's all about beams. Or you are the more digital assassin of the ship, where you just plug yourself in and go through the hacking gameplay. And then once you succeed, you get access to the states that we talked about for the item. So you can switch around the states of the item and mess up the ship. But what you can also do is decide to ignore the item and progress further through the ship. So you basically move from node to node inside the ship. Once you've successfully hacked this power plant, you will see all the connected items that you can then select and start the next hacking procedure. Then you can make your way to whatever item you actually wanted to target and then change its functionality: turn it off, or vent a room if you want to target the life support. Every functionality that you see on the engineering screen would be accessible through that hacking process.

Hacking has been in the cards for Star Citizen, for the Persistent Universe and for Squadron 42, for some time. Intrepid viewers of the public roadmap might remember there was a hacking card on the public roadmap for quite a while. We actually had filmed a segment for ISC way back when detailing how hacking was going to work, and it was filmed and it was edited, and then somebody had a great idea about how to change it, and it fundamentally changed. And everything in that segment became wrong. So it's one of the few segments we've ever produced that never got aired. The only constant in game development is change. It affects our video production as well. But we already know the time and the place where we're going to reintroduce folks to hacking gameplay and how it's going to manifest. So stay tuned, no other updates about that.